Luke Willis Thompson
Luke Willis Thompson, born in 1988 in Auckland, New Zealand, is an artist who works mainly with film. He is of Fijian and European descent and lives in London.
Education and background: He earned his BFA (2009) and MFA (2010) from the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. He also studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (2013–2014).
Career: Thompson has shown his work widely in New Zealand and abroad. Notable solo exhibitions include Misadventure at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane (2016) and Autoportrait at the Chisenhale Gallery (2017–2018), as well as a survey at the Adam Art Gallery (2018). His work has appeared in major group shows and festivals such as the New Museum Triennial Surround Audience (2015), the Asia-Pacific Triennial at the Queensland Art Gallery (2016), La Biennale de Montréal (2016), and Remai Modern’s Field Guide.
Awards and recognition: Thompson won the Walters Prize in 2014 for thisholeonthisislandwhereiam. He held the Chisenhale Gallery Create Residency (2016–2017), during which he made Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries (2016) and Autoportrait (2017). In 2018 he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize for Autoportrait and was a finalist for the Tate Turner Prize in the same year.
Selected works and ideas: His 2012 work Untitled (2012) was shown in Auckland. Sucu Mate/Born Dead (2016) uses nine headstones from Fiji to highlight colonial histories and Pacific migration. Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries is a silent 16mm film about two young men linked to victims of police brutality. Autoportrait is a silent 35mm film about Diamond Reynolds after the shooting of Philando Castile. How Long? (2017) was filmed in Fiji.
In early 2018 his first public gallery solo show in New Zealand opened at the Adam Art Gallery, featuring Cemetery of Uniforms and Liveries, Autoportrait, and How Long? (2017).
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 19:42 (CET).